Forever, Interrupted

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

  I laugh. “I think I need to wait out that last margarita,” I say, and she smiles.

  “Dessert then!”

  She orders us fried ice cream and “dessert” nachos. We sit there, spoons in the ice cream, licking the chocolate around the bowls. It’s what I imagined sisters did with their mothers when their fathers were away on business. When I get in the car, I think of a few things I forgot to say and I find myself looking forward to seeing Susan again to tell her.

  Ana has been patient with my recovery, expecting nothing, supporting everything, but I can tell that I am starting to wear on her. Being my friend means she is pulled into this even though it has nothing to do with her. I can only assume that, after a while, even the most understanding and empathetic of people would start to wonder just how long it will be before we can have honest to God fun again. Fun that doesn’t end in a sorrowful look from me, fun that isn’t laced with what I have lost. She knew me before Ben, she knew me during Ben, and now she knows me after Ben. She’s never said it, but I would imagine the me she knew before Ben was probably her favorite.

  Ana said she’d be at my place at eight to pick me up, but she calls at seven asking if I mind if she brings this guy she has been seeing.

  “Who have you been seeing?” I say. I didn’t know she was seeing anyone.

  “Just this guy, Kevin.” She laughs, and I suspect he’s right there next to her.

  “I’m just some guy?” I hear in the background, confirming my suspicion. I can hear her shush him.

  “Anyway, is that okay? I want him to meet you,” she says.

  “Uh, sure,” I say, taken aback. You can’t say no in a situation like this. It’s rude and weird, but I wonder, if the rules of propriety allowed it, what I would have said.

  “Cool,” she says. “Be there at eight to pick you up. You still want to go to that ramen house?”

  “Sure!” I overcompensate for my apprehension by being outwardly perky and excited. It feels obvious to me, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Maybe I’ve been getting really good at hiding my emotions, or maybe she’s not paying attention.

  APRIL

  Ben and I were waiting in the front of the movie theater for Ana. She was twenty minutes late and the tickets were on her credit card. The movie was starting in seven minutes. Ben was one of the only people I knew that looked forward to the previews more than the actual movie.

  “Can you call her again?” he asked me.

  “I just called her! And texted. She’s probably just parking.”

  “Ten bucks she hasn’t left the house yet.”

  I slapped him lightly across the chest. “She’s left the house! C’mon. We won’t be late for the movie.”

  “We’re already late for the movie.”

  He said this would happen. I said it wouldn’t happen, but here we were, just like he said we would be. He was right.

  “You’re right.”

  “There she is!” Ben pointed toward a woman running through the food court to the movie theater. There was a man behind her.

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  “How would I know?”

  Ana slowed herself as she reached us. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  “I’m sure you had a good reason,” Ben said to her. You could hear in his voice that he had no expectation of a good reason. Ana jokingly glared at him.

  “Marshall, this is Elsie and Ben.” The man behind her extended his hand to us, and we each shook it. “Marshall is going to join us.”

  “All right, well, let’s get to it, shall we? We’re already missing previews!” Ben said.

  “Well, I still need to print the tickets. Will you guys go get us some popcorn?”

  Ben looked at me incredulously and rolled his eyes. I laughed at him. “I want a Diet Coke,” I said.

  Ben and Marshall ran ahead to the concession as Ana and I picked up the tickets from the kiosk.

  “Who is this guy?” I said to her. She shrugged. “I don’t know. He keeps asking me out and I finally just relented and invited him here to get it over with.”

  “So it’s true love, I guess,” I said. She picked up the tickets and started walking toward Ben and Marshall.

  “True love, schmoo love,” she said. “I’m just trying to find someone that doesn’t bore me to tears for a little while.”

  “You depress me,” I said, but I wasn’t paying attention to her when I said it. I was looking at Ben, who was asking the cashier for more butter on his already buttered popcorn. I was smiling. I was grinning. I was in love with the weirdo.

  “No, you depress me,” she said.

  I turned to her and laughed. “You don’t think that one day you’ll meet ‘the One’?”

  “Love has made you sappy and gross,” she said to me. We had almost met up with Ben and Marshall when I decided to tell her the news.

  “Ben’s moving in,” I said. She stopped dead in her tracks and dropped her purse.

  “What?”

  Ben saw her face and caught my eye. He knew what was going on, and he smiled at me mischievously as he put a handful of popcorn into his mouth. I smiled back at him. I picked up Ana’s purse. She pulled me aside by my shoulders as Ben watched, standing next to a very confused Marshall.

  “You are crazy! You’re basically sending yourself to a prison. You wake up, he’s there. You go to sleep, he’s there. He’s going to always be there! He’s a great guy, Elsie. I like him a lot. I’m happy that you two found each other, but c’mon! This is a death sentence.”

  I just looked at her and smiled. For the first time, I felt like I had something over her. Sure, she was stunning and gorgeous and lively and bright. Men wanted her so badly they’d hound her for dates. But this man wanted me, and unlike Ana, I had felt what it was like to be wanted by someone you wanted just as badly. I wanted that for her, but there was a small part of me that felt victorious in that I had it and she didn’t even know enough to want it.

  SEPTEMBER

  Ana and Kevin are only three minutes late. She opens my door with her own key. Ana looks hot. Really hot, spared-no-expense, pull-all-the-punches hot. I am dressed like I’m going to the grocery store. Kevin is right behind her, and while I am expecting some overly tailored douche bag with hair better than mine, I find a much different person.

  Kevin is short, at least shorter than Ana. He’s about my height. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt; looks like he got the grocery store memo too. His face is nondescript. His skin is mostly clear but somewhat muddled; his hair is a shade of brown best described as “meh,” and he looks like he neither works out nor is a slovenly couch potato.

  He leans toward me, around Ana. “Kevin,” he says, shaking my hand. It’s not a bold handshake, but it’s not a dead fish. It’s polite and nice. He smiles and I smile back. I see him take in his surroundings, and I start to look around my house as well, as an impulse. I see my living room through his eyes. He no doubt knows about me, knows that my husband is dead, knows that Ana is my best friend; maybe he knows that I feel like he is trying to take her away from me. As he looks, I feel self-conscious about all of Ben’s things around us. I want to say, “I’m not some crazy woman. It’s just too hard to put these away yet.” But I don’t, because saying you’re not crazy makes you seem crazy.

  “Shall we?” Ana says. Kevin and I nod. Within a few seconds we are out the door. We cram into Kevin’s Honda. I offer to take the backseat, and I squeeze myself into it by ducking and crunching behind the passenger-side door. Why do two-door cars exist? It is the most cumbersome of all tasks to try to wedge yourself into the backseat of one.

  On the way to the restaurant, Ana is clearly trying to give Kevin and me a common thread upon which to build a relationship. It feels so strange. I get the distinct impression that Ana is trying to make sure Kevin and I get along. She’s trying to make sure I like Kevin. She’s never done that before. She’s never cared. Most of the time, meeting me is their death knell. She uses me to let them know that she
doesn’t need alone time with them, that we are all friends. This isn’t that. She’s not kicking him out the door. She’s inviting him inside.

  “How did you guys meet?” I ask from the backseat.

  “Oh, at yoga,” he says, paying attention to the road.

  “Yeah, Kevin was always in my Tuesday night class and he was just so bad”—she laughs—“that I had to personally help him.”

  “I’ve tried to explain to her that instructors are supposed to help their students, but she seems to think she was doing me a favor,” he jokes, and I laugh politely as if this is hilarious. I’m missing whatever it is this guy has going for him. “Worked out in my favor though, since it got her to ask me out.”

  “Can you believe that, Elsie?” Ana says, half turning her face toward me in the backseat. “I asked him out.”

  I thought he’d been joking.

  “Wait,” I say, leaning forward. “Kevin, Ana asked you out?”

  Kevin nods as he enters the parking garage and starts to look for a parking space.

  “Ana has never asked anyone out the entire time I’ve known her,” I tell him.

  “I’ve never asked anyone out in my entire life,” she clarifies.

  “So why Kevin?” I ask and immediately realize that I have not phrased it in a polite way. “I just mean—what made you change your mind? About asking people out, I mean.”

  Kevin finds a spot and parks the car. Ana grabs his hand. “I don’t know.” She looks at him. “Kevin’s different.”

  I want to vomit. I go so far as to make a vomit noise as a joke to them, but neither of them finds it funny. They aren’t even paying much attention to me. I realize, as I try to climb out of the backseat of this shitty little car without injuring myself, that Kevin has hijacked my dinner plans with Ana and they are just letting me come along as a courtesy. I am a third wheel.

  You try being a widow and a third wheel. You will never feel more alone.

  We get to the restaurant, and it seems pretty cool, actually. Kevin and Ana are having a good time regardless of whether I am.

  “How long have you two been dating?” I ask. I’m not sure what to expect, or rather, I don’t expect anything.

  “Uh”—Kevin starts to think—“just about a month?” he says.

  Ana looks somewhat uncomfortable. “More or less,” she says, and then she changes the subject. How could my best friend have been dating someone for the past month and never mentioned him to me? I refuse to believe that she talked about him and I wasn’t listening. That’s not who I am, even now. I try to listen to other people. How could Ana go from a person who would never settle down, never care about a man, to a woman who asks a man out and invites him to crash dinner with her best friend? And she did this all on her own time, never mentioning it to me, as if it were a side project of self-development that she didn’t want to reveal until it was complete.

  After dinner, they drive me back to my house and say good night. Kevin kisses me on the cheek sweetly and looks me in the eye when he says it was nice to meet me. He says he hopes to see me again soon, and I believe him. I wonder if maybe the thing that Kevin has going for him is that he is very sincere. Maybe Ana is attracted to how genuine he is. If that’s the case, I can understand.

  I call her a few hours later, and my call goes through to voice mail. I’m sure they are together. I try again in the morning, and she puts me through to voice mail again but texts me and says she’ll call later. She’s still with Kevin. Kevin is different. I can feel it. I can see it. It makes me nervous. I’ve already lost Ben. I can’t lose Ana. She can’t change her personality and priorities now. I’m just barely hanging on.

  She calls me Sunday afternoon and offers to come over. When she gets here, the first words out of her mouth are “What did you think of him? Adorable, right?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “He was really sweet, I liked him a lot.” This isn’t entirely untrue. Even if I don’t see exactly what about him is exceptional, he still seemed perfectly nice and likable.

  “Oh, Elsie! I’m so glad to hear you say that. I’ve been nervous for you two to meet and he was over yesterday afternoon and asked if he could join our dinner and I wasn’t sure how to—” She cuts herself off. “I’m just really glad you liked him.”

  “He was cool. He seems a bit”—how do I say this?—“out of character for you though, am I right?”

  She shrugs. “Something just clicked in me,” she says. “And I realized that I want to love someone, you know? I mean, everyone wants to love someone, right? I think I just mean, I finally feel ready to be with one person. And of all the people I’ve dated in the past, I think the problem was that I wasn’t into them. I was just into how much they were into me. But Kevin is different. Kevin wasn’t even into me. We would stay after and I would be helping him with his poses and touching him in these ways, you know how yoga is. And most men perk up when you get that close, they make it sexual when it isn’t sexual, but not Kevin. He was just really genuinely trying to get the pose right. So I started kind of . . . trying to make it sexual . . . just to see if I could get his attention, but he was just really focused.”

  So I was kind of right. It’s the sincerity that has made her smitten.

  “And I think I just . . . I want to be with someone that approaches things like that. That doesn’t think of me as a thing to possess or obtain. So I asked him out and he said yes and it made me so nervous, but I was proud of myself that I did it, and then from our first date, I just felt this . . . connection . . . ”

  I start to get mad because a strong connection on first dates is for Ben and me. It’s not common, it doesn’t just happen to everyone. And she’s watering it down. She’s making it seem like it’s not mine anymore.

  “I don’t understand why you didn’t mention it sooner,” I say.

  “Well.” Ana starts to grow uncomfortable. “I just . . . you are dealing with your own stuff and I didn’t think you wanted to hear about this,” she says, and that’s when it hits me. Ana pities me. Ana is now the one in love; Ana is the happy one; I am the sad one; the lonely one, the one to whom she doesn’t want to rub it in.

  “What made this ‘click’ just happen?” I ask. My words are sharp; my voice is bitter.

  “What?” she asks.

  “It’s interesting that you just ‘changed’ like that. You go from being this . . . kind of . . . from someone who . . . ” I give up on trying to name it. “Well to turn around now and be the poster child for love. What made you change your mind?”

  “You,” she says. She says it as if it will pacify me, as if I should be happy. “I just realized that life is about love. Or at least, it’s about loving someone.”

  “Do you hear yourself? You sound like a Valentine’s Day card.”

  “Whoa, okay,” she says as a reaction to the anger in my voice. “I’m sorry. I thought you’d be happy for me.”

  “Happy for you? My husband died and I’m sitting here miserable and alone, but you’ve learned from this whole experience how to love. Congratulations, Ana! We’re all really happy for you.”

  She is stunned, and unfortunately, because it is a silent stunned, I am able to continue.

  “Let’s all celebrate for Ana! She’s found true love! Her life wasn’t perfect enough with her perfect apartment and her perfect body and all of these men chasing her, but now, she’s evolved enough to see in my husband’s death a life lesson about the importance of love and romance.”

  Ana is now almost in tears, and I don’t want her to cry but I can’t stop myself.

  “Was it love at first sight? This romance of yours? Are you going to get married next week?”

  By now, all I have as evidence of how much Ben loved me is how quickly he knew he wanted to marry me. I honestly think that if Ana says Kevin has already started talking about marriage I will lose the only piece of life I have left in me.

  “No.” She shakes her head. “That’s not it.”

  “Then what is it, Ana?
Why are you doing this to me?”

  “What am I doing to you?” she finally explodes. “I haven’t done anything to you. All I did was meet someone I like and try to share it with you. Just like you did months ago to me and I was happy for you!”

  “Yeah, well, you weren’t widowed at the time.”

  “You know what, Elsie? You don’t have to be a widow every second of every day of your life.”

  “Yes, Ana, I do.”

  “No, you don’t. And you think you can just tell me to fuck off because you think I don’t know anything, but I know you better than anyone. I know you sit here at home alone and think about what you’ve lost. I know it consumes you. I know that you keep his things around like they are a fucking medal for how tortured you are.”

  “You know what—” I start, but she interrupts me.

  “No, Elsie. I’ll tell you what. Everyone may tiptoe around you, myself included, but at some point someone needs to remind you that you lost something you only had for six months. Six months. And I’m not saying this isn’t hard, but it’s not like you’re ninety and you lost your life partner here. You need to start living your life and letting other people live theirs. I have the right to be happy. I didn’t lose that right just because your husband died.”

  It’s quiet for a moment, as I look at her with my mouth wide open in shock.

  “And neither did you,” she adds, and she walks out the door.

  I stand there for a few minutes after she leaves, frozen. Then I reanimate. I walk into the back closet and find the pillow I stuffed in a trash bag right after he died, the pillow that smells like him. I just stand there, smelling it through the open hole at the top of the bag, until I can’t smell anything anymore.

  Ana calls me over and over again during the week, leaving messages that she’s sorry. That she should never have said those things. She leaves text messages saying much the same. I don’t answer them, I don’t answer her. I don’t know what to say to her because I’m not mad at her. I’m embarrassed. I’m lost.